History
Muslims first came to Germany as part of the diplomatic, military and economic relations between Germany and the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century. Twenty Muslim soldiers served under Frederick William I of Prussia, at the beginning of the 18th century. In 1745, Frederick II of Prussia established a unit of Muslims in the Prussian army called the "Muslim Riders" and consisting mainly of Bosniaks, Albanians and Tatars. In 1760 a Bosniak corps was established with about 1,000 men.
In 1798 a Muslim cemetery was established in Berlin. The cemetery, which moved in 1866, still exists today.
The German section of the World Islamic Congress and the Islam Colloquium, the first German Muslim educational institution for children, were established in 1932. At this time there were 3,000 Muslims in Germany, 300 of whom were of German descent.
The rise of Nazism in the country did not target Muslims. Adolf Hitler repeatedly expressed the view that Islam would have been much more compatible to the "Germanic races" than "meek" and "feeble" Christianity:
| “ | Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. | ” |
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Mohammad Amin al-Husayni energetically recruited Muslims for the SS (Schutzstaffel), the Nazi Party’s elite military command. He recruited Muslim volunteers for the German armed forces and was involved in the organization and recruitment of Muslims into several divisions of the Waffen SS and other units.
The Islamic Institut Ma’ahad-ul-Islam was founded in 1942, during World War 2, and is now known under the name "Zentralinstitut Islam-Archiv-Deutschland".
After the West German Government invited foreign workers ("Gastarbeiter") in 1961, the figure sharply rose to currently 4.3 million within two decades (most of them Turkish from the rural region of Anatolia in southeast Turkey). They are sometimes called a "parallel society" within ethnic Germans.
Read more about this topic: Islam In Germany
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